VARS Series Angelika
Angelika Name: Angelika Reyes-Stalherz (Adopted name, imprinted onto Ein early on.) Nicknames: Angie, Ange. Unit Designation: #44-1, "...Unit Designation #44-1, VARS series. What is yours? Take your time, we are in no hurry..." -Angie, to Sophia on their first contact. Angelika is a cybernetic weapons platform who happens to also be a little girl. One of a series of eight VARS-series cyborgs, Angelika is also the only one that was, at the time of rediscovery, still a child - she was developed in a laboratory to be a platform for multiple cybernetic attachments. She is unique in that she is not only one of the only remaining active models, but in that she is the only one who was not compromised somehow by Destiny's Call. Angelika alone, among all the other VARS-series units, was kept in stasis, as she was one of the first successful production models, and one of the project leads grew to have reservations about what the project could bring about. She was rescued during a mission by Heinrich Stalherz, and quickly took a shine to him, referring to him as her uncle and treating him as her only living 'family' until the discovery of her sister, Sophia. Though she has extensive combat programming and internal conditioning intended to make her into a combat unit, Angelika otherwise remains a little girl, both in body and mind. She maintains a somewhat young world-view, and seems to possess a pathological need to understand and learn things, and often peruses Raviel's library. She gets along particularly well with the celestial, and spends much of her free time there. Angelika gets along particularly well with Glenda and Prisma. She is largely distrusted by Cima. She is especially fond of Sophia, her sister, though with her need to monitor Sophia, it's sometimes uncertain who the older sister actually is. Despite this, she tries well to be a team player and a pleasant person at all times, trying to boost group morale with her cheerful personality and curiosity about the outside world. Background: Born from a top-secret and blacklisted cybernetics project, the VARS series was a series of adaptable cybernetic platforms for use in the war between Renalia and Paramis. The idea, at the time, was to create a platform for testing a variety of cybernetic limb and organ modifications - the VARS series was to test extensive modifications on a subject specifically adapted for them - ultimately the idea was to find new ways to bring otherwise incapacitated soldiers back into the field. Born - such as she was - in Renalia, in Facility 429, Angelika was created, like most hidden projects that are closed or lost, to be the weapon for a tomorrow that never came. Like the rest of her series, Angie is an artificially-created young girl who had been born and bred within the Facility's laboratories to be compatible with the cybernetic hardware of the time due to exposure to the compound Grey-3149, a form of nanite solution meant to easily bond cybernetic augmentations to organic tissue without risking rejection, malfunctions and cybershock. Unfortunately, she was placed into storage for a while in a containment chamber in order to survive the destruction going on outside in the desperate last-ditch attempt to wipe out the armies of Paramis during the Ekris War. The lab became empty soon after, and the project wiped from all records by whoever had survived, but for many years, the facility was otherwise untouched by the great destruction that occurred. Of course, this being the great cataclysm that reduced the northern part of the country to ash and waste, the words of the science team on the eve of the war carried tremendous weight. As Angelika heard the oncoming storm, she carried out her orders until being placed into containment within a stasis capsule. For some time, she remembered nothing of the Facility except when her 'Father' Dr. Tristan Reyes, and his team, woke her up and ran a few basic diagnostics, then continued to work on her. 'Don't leave us,' Reyes would often state, as he began to care for her like a child, '...the outside is full of danger, and you're safe here, with us.' Later, these white lies transformed into 'There is no outside. There is only the facility.' After all, the last living things she'd seen were fleeting glimpses of the science team who created her, and every day, with the encouragement of Dr. Reyes, she would be tested, improved upon, upgraded to the limit of the technology they constructed. So Angie stayed there, being tested and retested to reach perfection. Or so she had assumed. New information suggests that shortly before the destruction of the Ashalaren Plains occurred, Dr. Reyes, had changed his mind about the VARS project, and had sabotaged Angie's stasis cycle of his own free will, opting to have the emotional inhibitors common in the other models not to be implanted into her brain, due to the growing dissatisfaction and morality concerns over building beings made simply for war. In a way, she was stillborn, due this damage, along with the wear and tear of the years in her containment, radiation leaks and some damage to the room itself errant scavengers trying to open the sealed blast doors leading to her stasis chamber. She had lost a lot of her original personality and memory due to this slight damage, and as a result, she seemed rather stoic and calm when first discovered in the present, but soon developed a new personality of her own, warm, curious, kind, and very dedicated to her friends. Without the mental conditioning, nor the upgrades from her base model, Angie had been lucky to have avoided the fate of her other sisters - to become drones without a sense of self or free will, and in her mind, unable to live. This is why despite her basic training years ago, she routinely trains herself even more in order to reach her full potential.